On the humble power brick…

Posted on January 3, 2011 by dw

power_bricks 007

Reading Karl’s great blog post on repairing a kijiji’d synthesizer, I thought about how sad the original owner must have been when he smoked his nice Korg Poly-800 MKII just by plugging in the wrong power supply.  I also thought about how avoidable this is and all the things I’ve had to figure out about power bricks in my travels as an electronics scrounger/repurposer.

Wouldn’t it be great if manufacturers clearly labeled power jacks on their devices with

  • (a) polarity
  • (b) input voltage
  • (c) required current, and
  • (d) if the input voltage needs to be regulated? 

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Painting with light–a study

Posted on December 31, 2010 by dw

D90_firsts-040

ISO 200, f/5.0, 43 seconds – DW painting

Wasting no time after picking up the Nikon D90, my first DSLR ever, I wanted to do some long exposures and a bit of an experiment with LED lights.  For this shot, the camera was tripod mounted and in “bulb” mode for shutter, triggered by a remote control.  Shot this in Dave White’s near-totally dark bachelor pad.  We used a hacked-up dollar store “fibre optic” lamp that featured a red, green, and blue LED.  I tripped the shutter and traced around Dave White with the red LED.  After a couple of trials, Dave White suggested slowing the LED trace around the hands to highlight them more.  Cool effect!

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Woolfitt’s art supplies in Toronto

Posted on December 29, 2010 by dw

Woolfits_Toronto 067

I booked it over to Toronto this afternoon to pick up a mint Kijiji’d Nikon D90 (first DSLR! so expect better pics here… eventually), with my brother-from-the-very-same-mother, Dave White, riding shotgun.  Dave White needed supplies to build a canvas stretcher for some oil painting he’s doing, so we stopped at Woolfit’s Art Enterprises Inc. on Queen West.  This is a great store for makers…

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New blog + really smart/cool guys at IQC

Posted on December 29, 2010 by dw

IQC_2010-08-06 060

Hey makers!  A new year approaching inspires a new blog.  My thanks to the hardest working maker at kwartzlab, Ben Brown, for setting me up on my own host with WordPress (so long, old blog and drupal).  Ben runs his own company, GRK Microsystems Inc., locally here, so please contact him for your hosting/networking/IT needs.  The guy’s a walking solution.  So adjust your RSS link, keep following me on Twitter and on to the content…

Back in August (yes, a little catching up to do), my friend John Storozuk asked me if I’d like to join a limited-audience tour of the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC), which is a stone’s throw from our office.  Would I???  Yes, please!  IQC, part of the University of Waterloo, is a world-leading research facility tackling the quantum universe right here in our own backyard.

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